"Rabble" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of a lifetime. Little boys and girls come on the stage in the arms of the mothers—matrons of Jerusalem. Older boys shout in the rabble and become at last Roman soldiers or servants of the High Priest. Still later, the best of them are ranged among the Apostles, and the rare genius becomes Pilate, John, ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... "Rabble! Can a man repent before such people? Some are afraid to hear of repentance, others laugh at a sinner. I was about to unburden myself completely; the heart trembled. Let me, I thought. No, I didn't think at all. Just so! Get out of here! And see that you never show yourself ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... of any man of character and common sense. It is not enough that these persons quickly disgust their audiences, and have a brief life upon the list. They ought never to be introduced to the public as lecturers; and any momentary augmentation of receipts that may be secured from the rabble by the patronage of such mountebanks is more than lost by the disgrace they bring and the damage they do to what is called "The Lecture System." It is an insult to any lyceum-audience to suppose that it can ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... "to gain a short, contemptible, and soon-fading reward, not to stir the constancy and solid firmness of any wise man ... but to catch the worthless approbation of an inconstant, irrational, and image-doting rabble." ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... post on Chesnut Hill, in front of Washington's right wing. Here he remained for two days, with his troops drawn out in line of battle, hoping to tempt Washington to come to a general engagement. Nothing occurred, however, but a slight skirmish, in which the American militia ran like a rabble before some light-infantry; and Howe then removed to Edge Hill, about a mile from Washington's left wing. Here a decided advantage was gained by Lord Cornwallis, who drove a strong body of the American troops from the crest of that hill, and a favourable opportunity was afforded, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... entreaties; and perhaps it was unreasonable to expect them to engage in a deadly conflict with their own neighbours, relatives, and personal friends, in the defence of mere strangers like ourselves. They could not even restrain the younger and more violent portion of the rabble from carrying on the species of desultory warfare, from which Barton had already suffered; on the contrary, the stones and other missiles, thrown by persons on the outskirts of the crowd, fell continually thicker and faster. At length Rokoa ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... Normans, Russians, Indo-English; Founders of what we call Aristocracies. Which indeed have they not the most 'divine right' to found;—being themselves very truly [Greek: Aristoi], Bravest, Best; and conquering generally a confused rabble of Worst, or at lowest, clearly enough, of Worse? I think their divine right, tried, with affirmatory verdict, in the greatest Law-Court known to me, was good! A class of men who are dreadfully exclaimed against by Dryasdust; of whom nevertheless ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... from those whom he had bribed; but presently he was hailed by the tumultuous clamours of the populace in general as emperor, and hurried off to the senate-house, where he found none of the nobles, but only a small number of the rabble of the city; and so he went on with speed, but in an ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... maintain small but well-drilled private armies, armed with modern weapons and organized on European lines. The "army" of Mangku Negoro consists of about a thousand men, and is a far more efficient fighting force than the fantastically uniformed rabble maintained by his suzerain, the Susuhunan. In certain respects this arrangement resembles the plan which is followed at West Point and Annapolis, where, if the appointee fails to meet the entrance requirements, the appointment goes to an alternate, who has been ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... sister, and you, my friend, in the great course of infinite progress and general perfection, had you been with me, almost broken-hearted among that rabble of children, who will never, never know what childhood is, the last pound of butter and dozen of eggs in our village would be freely given to support my mission here. Barefooted, bareheaded, barelegged, and, it seemed ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... you please, Mr. Loftus. I have been deceived in your character; the friend of the Baroness Surowkoff must be consistent; he must be as willing to fight for the cause he espouses as to speak for it: in this case, the sword must follow the oration, else we shall see Poland in the hands of a rabble.' ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... "Quaker City" than had been witnessed there since the preceding Presidential election. The party-leaders began to lay their plans early, and the wire-pullers on both sides were unusually busy in their vocation. At the head of the rabble upon which one of the parties depended for many votes, was a drunken and profane fellow, whom we will call Tom Simmons. Tom was great at electioneering and stump-spouting in bar-rooms and rum-caucuses, and his party always looked to him, at each election, ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... especially in the Lausitz, are a good deal disturbed by Austrian Tolpatcheries; and do feats, heroic in the small way, in smiting down that rabble. A valuable Officer or two is lost in such poor service, poor but indispensable; [Funeral Discourses (of a very curious, ponderous and serious tone), in Gesammelte Nachrichten, ii. 458, 464, &c.] and the troops have not always the repose which is intended ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Seven-Years War: First Campaign—1756-1757. • Thomas Carlyle
... have splendid times doubtless! Wheat, under the new dispensation, ought to bring twenty dollars a bushel, and boots would not be worth more than two hundred dollars a pair, and the farmers of our country would be as well off as Santa Anna's rabble of Mexican soldiers, who were allowed ten dollars a day for their services and charged eleven for their rations and clothing. The sixteen hundred millions of greenbacks added to the amount already issued would give us some twenty-three hundred ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... of the gates. The townspeople fraternised with the assailants, and the very Manchus, who had looked so valiant in face of Sir Hugh Gough's force ten years before, now surrendered their lives and their honour after a mere show of resistance to a force which was nothing better than an armed rabble. The Manchu colony of Nanking, to the number of some 4000 families, had evidently fallen off from its high renown. Instead of dying at their posts, they threw themselves on the pity of the Taeping leader. Their ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume I • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... among thee of coming to the palace in a body, and of asking the discharge of thy grandson from the Doge, in the name of the rabble ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... teach me to forget myself! For whilst I think I am thy married wife, And thou a prince, protector of this land, Methinks I should not thus be led along, Mail'd up in shame, with papers on my back, And follow'd with a rabble that rejoice To see my tears and hear my deep-fet groans. The ruthless flint doth cut my tender feet, And when I start, the envious people laugh And bid me be advised how I tread. Ah, Humphrey, can I ...
— King Henry VI, Second Part • William Shakespeare [Rolfe edition]
... the agreement, that they should be disarmed before being allowed to leave the town, their first impulse was to refuse to lay down their weapons before a rabble which had run away from a few musket shots; but the general succeeded in soothing their sense of humiliation and winning their consent by representing to them that there could be nothing dishonourable in an action which prevented the children of a common ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... in the Confutation of an Absurdity that shews itself at the first Sight. It does not want any great Measure of Sense to see the Ridicule of this monstrous Practice; but what makes it the more astonishing, it is not the Taste of the Rabble, but of Persons of the greatest Politeness, ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... was desolating the land. Soon after, this association assembled at St. George's Fields, to the astonishing number of fifty thousand people, marshalled in separate bands, with blue cockades; and this immense rabble proceeded through the city of London to the House of Parliament, preceded by a man carrying a petition signed by twelve hundred thousand names. The rabble took possession of the lobby of the house, making the old palace ring with their passionate ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... front of the caffè, we found some twenty horsemen, carrying guns,—rough and ready fellows, looking as if a dash into the forest, whether against hogs or gendarmes, would equally suit them. We were followed by a rabble on foot, attended by dogs of a variety of species, some of them strong and fierce. After winding through the narrow lanes among the vineyards, our cavalcade was joined by one of the gentlemen on whom we had called with ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... sake had William wished that he was rich, but never had he felt so intense a longing for money, as he did when Jenny sat weeping at his side, and starting at each new sound which came up from the rabble below. ...
— The English Orphans • Mary Jane Holmes
... enrolled yourself among that rabble who call themselves the Sons of Liberty? Yes; I know it, ...
— Neal, the Miller - A Son of Liberty • James Otis
... oration which we possess—which we must teach ourselves to regard as altogether different from that which Cicero had been able to pronounce among Pompey's soldiers and the Clodian rabble—the reader is astonished by the magnificence of the language in which a case so bad in itself could be enveloped, and is made to feel that had he been on the jury, and had such an address been made to him, he would certainly ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... to attack us again or to drop the business and ride back towards the trumpet-calls now sounding confusedly along the crest of the downs; when, to their and our worse dismay, was heard a pounding of hoofs on the road behind us, and over the bridge at our backs came riding a rabble of mounted men with a woman at their head—a woman dressed all in scarlet with a black flapping hat and a scarlet feather. What manner of woman she was I had no time to guess. But she rode with uplifted arm, grasping a pistol and waving the others forward; and her ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... Ez for yoo, Doolittle, yoo never wuz half baked; yoo, Thurlow, put Raymond in your vest pocket, and quit the presence. Yoo, Jim Lane, I leave to the tender mercies uv my friends in Kansas. Clear out the balance uv this rabble, and send for my friends. I've bin pizened, and smothered, and stunk nigh to death. Clear out the house, and sweep it, and sprinkle chloride uv lime; and sich, all over it. Shut down them Southern windows, and open those on the North, East, and ...
— "Swingin Round the Cirkle." • Petroleum V. Nasby
... bloodsuckers, the vagabonds of finance, introduced by La Pompadour, herself the spring of this foulness. One portion of it demeans itself in its servility to the court; the other portion is amalgamated with that quill-driving rabble who are converting the blood of the king's subjects into ink; another perishes stifled beneath vile robes, the ignoble atoms of cabinet-dust which an office drags up out of the mire;" and all, parvenus of the old or of the new stock, form a band called the ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... public, I was condemn'd a sforzato to the galleys, for poisoning the cardinal Bembo's—cook, hath at all attached, much less dejected me. No, no, worthy gentlemen; to tell you true, I cannot endure to see the rabble of these ground ciarlitani, that spread their cloaks on the pavement, as if they meant to do feats of activity, and then come in lamely, with their mouldy tales out of Boccacio, like stale Tabarine, the fabulist: some of them ...
— Volpone; Or, The Fox • Ben Jonson
... lifting his hat in grave gesture. "I feel like a condemned coward, my name a byword for the rabble, being here in such comparative safety, when, in honor, I should be lying ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... crew in the forecastle suffered less it was because they had less to lose. Officers and men were then tumbled into boats and taken ashore, half-naked and humiliated beyond words. Escorted by the exultant rabble, these three hundred luckless Americans were marched to the castle, where the Pasha sat in state. His Highness was in excellent humor. Three hundred Americans! He counted them, each worth hundreds of ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... Greek and other creeds. The two villages near Lida, two in the government of Grodno, the hundreds of villages and thousands of huts near Dwina, Rzezyca, Mohilew, Witebsk, burned, razed to the ground by an excited and hired rabble of Muscovite Muziks, who had sought and found hospitality in Poland for hundreds of years—certainly all these villages and huts were not inhabited even by the 'lesser nobility.' And it is also certain that ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... be at the strategic points of the world's activities, struggling for success in the thick of things. The city attracts the country boy who is ambitious, exactly as old Rome attracted the immature German. The blare of its noisy traffic, the glare of its myriad lights, the rush and the roar and the rabble all urge him to get into the scramble for fun and gain. The crowd attracts. The instinct of sociability draws people together. Those who are unfamiliar with rural spaces and are accustomed to live in crowded tenements find it lonesome in the country, and ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... Amid such a rabble, and as out of place as a swarm of butterflies in frost-silvered air, a band of high-born women was to be seen approaching the City this early December morning. Gorgeously attired pages, hardly more warlike than the women, made a ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... houses at a profit. On the 20th of June he witnesses, only as a matter of curiosity, the invasion of the Tuileries, and, on seeing the king at a window place the red cap on his head, exclaims, so as to be heard," Che Caglione!" Immediately after this: "How could they let that rabble enter! Mow down four or five hundred of them with cannons and the rest would run away." On August 10, when the tocsin sounds, he regards the people and the king with equal contempt; he rushes to a friend's house on the Carrousel and there, still ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... Clodius, accompanied with a crowd of profligate and impudent ruffians, standing up in a place above the rest, put questions to the populace as follows: "Who is the dissolute general? who is the man that seeks another man? who scratches his head with one finger?" and the rabble, upon the signal of his shaking his gown, with a great shout to every question, like singers making, responses in a ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... memory is a great concern compared to many of the trifling niceties, comforts, offences, and rectangularities which, perhaps, we do not think it an ignoble use of heart and time to waste ourselves upon. It would be well enough to entertain the rabble of small troubles and offences, if we could lay them aside with the delightful facility of children, who, after an agony of tears, are soon found laughing or asleep. But the chagrin and vexation of grown-up people are grown-up ...
— Friends in Council (First Series) • Sir Arthur Helps
... all India?" she said; "that dull reiterated sound? It half stupefies, half maddens. Once at Darjiling I saw the Lamas' Devil Dance—the soul, a white-faced child with eyes unnaturally enlarged, fleeing among a rabble of devils—the evil passions. It fled wildly here and there and every way was blocked. The child fell on its knees, screaming dumbly—you could see the despair in the staring eyes, but all was drowned in the thunder of Tibetan drums. No ...
— The Ninth Vibration And Other Stories • L. Adams Beck
... muskets and ammunition with us, but the power of England is more assuredly fixed in Ireland now than it was then—the influence of the old Irish families is broken, and even if we armed all who joined us, it would be but an armed rabble ...
— In the Irish Brigade - A Tale of War in Flanders and Spain • G. A. Henty
... Justice abides. The troops filed past the body, for the most part silently, while desultory cries of "Viva Espana!" from among the "patriotic" Filipino volunteers were summarily hushed by a Spanish artillery-officer's stern rebuke: "Silence, you rabble!" To drown out the fitful cheers and the audible murmurs, the bands struck up Spanish national airs. Stranger death-dirge no man and system ever had. Carnival revelers now dance about the scene and Filipino schoolboys play baseball over ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... the window of a shop near the Tuileries, he looked down on the strange events which dealt the coup de grace to the dying monarchy. Again the chieftain within him sided against the vulture rabble and with the well-meaning monarch who kept his troops to a tame defensive. "If Louis XVI." (so wrote Buonaparte to his brother Joseph) "had mounted his horse, the victory would have been his—so I judge from the spirit which prevailed in the morning." When all was over, when Louis sheathed his ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... seek In all our Latin terms of art and Greek; Would never understand one word of sense The most irrefragable schoolman means: As if the Schools design'd their terms of art, Not to advance a science, but to divert; As Hocus Pocus conjures to amuse The rabble ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... Athenian's Idea of the Gods.—The average intelligent citizen probably has views midway between the stupid rabble and the daring philosophers. To him the gods of Greece stand out in full divinity, honored and worshipped because they are protectors of the good, avengers of the evil, and guardians of the moral law. They punish crime and reward virtue, though ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... hath done A mischief similar—I see the point— Hath he not arm'd the bigot, ghastly wretch, To stab our English lives? hath he not sown A crop of wild sedition, discord, hate, Using the vain creed of the rabble herd To ...
— Cromwell • Alfred B. Richards
... ceased waving. Then the mob surged all the more angrily upon Peter and Jesus. Peter snatched his short sword from his belt and struck a wild blow. A man cried out sharply. The captain shouted a command: soldiers pushed through the rabble and seized Jesus. A burly soldier knocked Peter backward; he fell heavily ...
— Men Called Him Master • Elwyn Allen Smith
... doorway there came a tall, finely-featured brunette. She made her way through the yelling crowd as a duchess might cleave a path through a rabble. She was at the side of the cart in an instant. She gave us a bow and smile that were both a welcome and an act of appropriation. She held out a firm, soft, brown hand. When it closed on our own, we knew it to be the grasp of a friend, and the clasp ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... gratifying, and Mr. Fee was delighted; and we proceeded the following morning to our next appointment at Brooksville, in Bracken county. Here we found assembled a large crowd of that brutalized rabble element which formed the background of slavery everywhere. The aboriginal creatures gazed at us like so many wild animals, but showed not the slightest disposition to enter the house in which we were to speak. Mr. Clay remarked ...
— Political Recollections - 1840 to 1872 • George W. Julian
... parks, enjoying the scenery and sport excessively. A noble buck nsunnu, standing by himself, was the first thing seen on this side, though a herd of hertebeests were grazing on the Usoga banks. One bullet rolled my fine friend over, but the rabble looking on no sooner saw the hit than they rushed upon him and drove him off, for he was only wounded. A chase ensued, and he was tracked by his blood when a pongo (bush box) was started and divided ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... me with poetry and authorship. Huisgen wished me to be a Timon after his fashion, but, at the same time, an able jurisconsult, —a necessary profession, as he thought, with which one could, in a regular manner, defend one's self and friends against the rabble of mankind, succor the oppressed, and, above all, pay off a rogue; though the last is neither ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... A rabble of a dozen or two of men and boys followed Mace up the street. He led the way with great strides, shouting his threats. As they passed along, women thrust their heads out at the windows, asking, "What's the matter?" And someone ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... fixed bayonets. The mob surged around, heaping on us insults and blows; particularly the women. With hate in their eyes, they spat on us. We had to take that or the bayonet. These were the acts not only of the rabble, but also of the people ...
— The Escape of a Princess Pat • George Pearson
... Liegeois to carry their acts of open hostility to their neighbour, still farther afield. The other towns of the Church state were infected by an anti-Burgundian sentiment. In Dinant this feeling was high, and there was, moreover, a manifestation of special animosity against the Count of Charolais. A rabble marched out of the city to the walls of Bouvignes, a town of Namur, loyal to Burgundy, carrying a stuffed figure with a cow-bell round its neck. Certain well-known emblems of Burgundy on a tattered mantle showed that ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam
... does not proceed, inasmuch as the Porpoise is the smallest of the whales. Above, you have all the Leviathans of note. But there are a rabble of uncertain, fugitive, half-fabulous whales, which, as an American whaleman, I know by reputation, but not personally. I shall enumerate them by their fore-castle appellations; for possibly such a list may be valuable to future investigators, who may complete what I have here but begun. ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... was a certain duke, who, by reason of his virtues, had got himself banished from his country. The man was thrifty and economical, though without neglecting himself. Nevertheless, the rabble had dethroned him and sent him across the border with a bushel of diamonds. Of these diamonds he was now to display a few dozen in the shape of coat-buttons and the like. The newspapers gave the crowd their cue accordingly. They ...
— Walter Pieterse - A Story of Holland • Multatuli
... tell ye, Ivan, though ye be my son, never mair shall I call ye so, if ye join the rabble that young scamp has got together, and never mair shall ye darken the doors of Dunmorton if ye gae wi' him. Noo choose between that young pretender and your ...
— Marie Gourdon - A Romance of the Lower St. Lawrence • Maud Ogilvy
... midst. Fire engines poured streams of fetid water upon the congregation. Stones fell so thickly that the faces of many grew crimson with blood. At Hoxton the mob drove an ox into the midst of the congregation. At Pensford the rabble, who had been baiting a bull, concluded their sport by driving the torn and tired animal full against the table on which Wesley was preaching. Sometimes we find innkeepers refusing to receive the Methodist leaders in their inns, ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... heard. Lafayette's National Guard were approaching, and as the serried lines, advancing at the double, reached the Court of Marble, their drum-beats suddenly burst into a thunderous roll, and the Court, the staircase, and the halls were cleared of the cowardly rabble. ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... is still one other bother, a kind of bother botherum, to tell of, though I hesitate at the telling. It brings this rabble herd of worries into line and makes them formidable; it is, so to speak, the Bother Commander-in-Chief. Well! Euphemia. I simply worship the ground she treads upon, mind, but at the same time the truth is the truth. Euphemia is a bother. ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... prominent. Stand your ground therefore when they advance, and again wait your opportunity to retire in good order, and you will reach a place of safety all the sooner, and will know for ever afterwards that rabble such as these, to those who sustain their first attack, do but show off their courage by threats of the terrible things that they are going to do, at a distance, but with those who give way to them are quick enough ...
— The History of the Peloponnesian War • Thucydides
... loyalty of a class shivering under deprivation of luxuries, with its God Comfort beggared? Ay, my Beauchamp,"—the most offensive thing to me is that "my Beauchamp," but old Nevil has evidently given himself up hand and foot to this ruffian—"ay, when you reflect that fear of the so-called rabble, i.e. the people, the unmoneyed class, which knows not Comfort, tastes not of luxuries, is the main component of their noisy frigid loyalty, and that the people are not with them but against, and yet that the people might be won by ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... auxiliary disciplines of biology, botany and zoology, physiology and anatomy, are enlisted in the service of anthropology and ethnology. The question as to whether a particular nation is a Kultur Volk or whether it is only a rabble of slaves depends entirely on whether the facies is square or oval, brachycephalic or oligocephalic. It depends entirely—to use the pedantic jargon of the anthropologist—on the "cephalic ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... continued plundering in some of the downtown streets without any discrimination—simply yielding to an uncontrollable desire for destruction. As a result a regular battle ensued between this mob, which consisted chiefly of Russian and Italian rabble, on one hand, and Irish workingmen who were defending their homes, on the other. The Russian contingent seemed to consist largely of the riff-raff which had found such a ready refuge in New York during ...
— Banzai! • Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff
... a rabble, accompanied the Shawnee belt bearers to the edge of the woods, and there the aged chief said graciously ...
— The Forest Runners - A Story of the Great War Trail in Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... following resolutions:—That the heads of the university, and mayor of the city, neglected to make public rejoicings on the prince's birth-day; that the officers having met to celebrate that day, the house in which they had assembled was assaulted, and the windows were broken by the rabble; that this assault was the beginning and occasion of the riots that ensued. That the conduct of the mayor seemed well justified by the affidavits produced on his part; that the printing and publishing the depositions upon which the complaints relating to the riots at ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... permission to hold forth in the public market house, and even then so great was the hostility of the rabble, that they tried to bluff us off, by threats and epithets. Our meeting was advertised to take place at nine o'clock, A.M. The pro-slavery parties hired a colored man to take a large auction bell, and go all over the city ringing it, and crying, ...
— Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave, Written by Himself • Henry Bibb
... cheated into trust; Whilst a black piece of phlegm, that lays about Dull menaces, and terrifies the rout, And cajoles it, with all its peevish strength Piteously stretch'd and botch'd up into length, Whilst the tired rabble sleepily obey Such opiate talk, and snore away the day, By all his noise as much their minds relieves, As caterwauling of wild cats frights thieves. But Rabelais was another thing, a man Made up of all that art and nature can ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... shouting, curious crowd, stands, waist-deep in the Nile, a slender-limbed boy, about ten years old. He belongs to a superior caste, and holds himself above the common rabble. Being perfectly naked, a careless eye might, however, rank him with the rest, were it not for the talisman which he wears suspended to a fine gold chain round his neck; a curiously designed diamond ring, the inheritance of a long line of priestly ancestors. ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... him with suspicion. At the English consulate they spoke very plainly, telling him unsympathetically that anyone who would make a friend of such a man as Mohammed-si-Koualdia and who would mingle "promiscuously" with such rabble, need look for nothing ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... crowd fought for coigns of vantage—a joyous, good-humored tussle. The great fountain sent its flashing silver spirts towards a blue heaven. As the death-cart lumbered into the Piazza ribald songs from the rabble saluted the criminal's ears, and his wild, despairing eyes lighted on many a merry face that but a few hours before had followed him to testify to righteousness; and, mixed with theirs, the faces of his fellow-Jews, sinister with malicious glee. No brother ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... the Earl pronounced didactically, "that a young lady of Miss Abbeway's birth and gifts should espouse the cause of this Labour rabble, a party already cursed with ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... isn't it, how a place can lie slumbering for generations, right at our doors, and no one has sense enough to look at it? And after all, it is while it is sleeping, or beginning to stir, that it charms. Two years from now, when the rabble get onto the racket, the glory will be gone. Think of picnics on the Hills! Imagine a crowd rushing for the dunes, and the bay thick with sails! No! Let's make the best ...
— Janet of the Dunes • Harriet T. Comstock
... fond of that sport. But the fashion of rapid driving deserted England; and, I believe, trotted over to America. Where are the amusements of our youth? I hear of no gambling now but amongst obscure ruffians; of no boxing but amongst the lowest rabble. One solitary four-in-hand still drove round the parks in London last year; but that charioteer must soon disappear. He was very old; he was attired after the fashion of the year 1825. He must drive to the banks of Styx ere long,—where the ferry-boat waits to carry him ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... looked (after the comparative lull that must obviously have succeeded to the clamours he had first heard), the roar and riot broke out worse than ever. There were the stormy revellers, as the rabble rout of Comus and his crew, filling that luxurious room with the sounds of noisy execration and half-drunken strife. Young Sir John, a free and generous fellow, by far the best among them all, has collected about him those whom he thought friends, to ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... upon a throne of ivory. The crown of Agrippa glittered upon his forehead with an unnatural brightness—it was of the purest gold, radiating from the brow in spikes, and flecked with pearls of an uncommon size. Silent—erect—inflated with pride at his own grandeur, and the adulation of the rabble, sate the King of Palestine. Silent—awe-stricken—uncovered before the majesty of the representative of Claudius, stood the people of Samaria and Phenicia. Extreme beauty of an elevated and heroic character shone upon the features of Herod, although ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... me that he looks upon it as his masterpiece, and that it may be considered as the highest point of perfection to which his system of novel-writing can be carried. Not a single name is given in the work, down even to the rabble, for which he has not contemporary authority; but what he is particularly proud of are his oaths. Nothing, he tells me, has cost him more trouble than the management of the swearing: and the Romans, you know, are a most profane nation. The great difficulty to be avoided was using the ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... shoulders rests our political and industrial world—with every quasi-military organization that throws down the gage of battle to the powers that be, then tell me, if you can, where Dives may look for defenders should the rabble rise in its wrath, the bullet supplant the ballot in the irrepressible conflict between the Cormorant and the Commune! And what are we doing to avert the danger? Distributing a little dole and preaching patience ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... It is interesting to note that Swift, who insisted that the word "mob" should never be used for "rabble," wrote "mob" in the 15th number of "The Examiner," and in Faulkner's reprint of 1741 the word was changed to "rabble." Scott notes: "The Dean carried on the war against the word 'mob' to the very last. A lady who died in 1788, and was well known to Swift, used ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... after her arrival, Mrs. Washington held her first levee, or drawing-room. It was attended by nearly all of the leading characters in social and political life then in the federal metropolis. "There was no place for the intrusion of the rabble in crowds, or for the mere coarse and boisterous partisan," says Colonel Stone in some remarks upon these receptions. "There was no place for the vulgar electioneerer or impudent place-hunter. On the contrary, they were select, and more courtly than have been given by any of Washington's ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... Paris, and were equally depressed by the news from Varennes. As we shall presently see, it was with shouts of "Long live the King," "Church and State," "Down with the Dissenters," "No Olivers," "Down with the Rump," "No false Rights of Man," that the rabble of Birmingham wrecked and burnt the houses of Dr. Priestley and other prominent Nonconformists of that town. Only by slow degrees did this loyal enthusiasm give place to opinions which in course of time came to be called Radical. It may be well to trace briefly the fluctuations of public opinion, ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... the Reformer, hitherto confined mostly to Zurich and its territory, flowed out in all directions beyond these limits. The Zurich ambassadors had to witness a prelude of this in a riot at Luzern, where a disorderly rabble, instigated by several deputies of the diet sitting at that place, carried past their lodging an effigy of Zwingli with scoffs and curses, and burnt it with all the formalities used by the Inquisition. Two months later, in June, Caspar G[oe]ldi, who had been ...
— The Life and Times of Ulric Zwingli • Johann Hottinger
... condemns me to regret of Thee! Depart'st thou thus, thy virtues unrepaid With fame and honour, like a vulgar shade? 30 Let him forbid it, whose bright rod controls, And sep'rates sordid from illustrious souls, Drive far the rabble, and to Thee assign A happier lot with spirits worthy thine! Go, seek your home, my lambs; my thoughts are due To other cares than those of feeding you. Whate'er befall, unless by cruel chance The wolf first give me a ...
— Poemata (William Cowper, trans.) • John Milton
... Barleycorn! Imagine the advantage to them of operating upon a flabby horde of timorous and joyless slaves, afraid of all fun and kicking up, horribly moral, eager only to live as long as possible! What mule-like fidelity and efficiency could be got out of such a rabble! But how many Lincolns would you get out of it, and how many ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... jeering the misshapen thing A rabble of clouds flares out of the east. Like dogs unleashed After a beast, They stream on ...
— Sword Blades and Poppy Seed • Amy Lowell
... Calvinists, had assumed a most determined attitude of resistance. He vainly summoned the place to submission, and to admit a royalist garrison; and on receiving an obstinate refusal, he commenced the siege in form. An undisciplined rabble of between three thousand and four thousand Gueux, under the direction of John de Soreas, gathered together in the neighborhood of Lille and Tournay, with a show of attacking these places. But the governor ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... conduct adopted towards Valenciennes allowed the other towns which were similarly situated to infer the fate which was intended for them also, and at once put the whole league in motion. An army of the Gueux, between three thousand and four thousand strong, which was hastily collected from the rabble of fugitives, and the remaining bands of the Iconoclasts, appeared in the territories of Tournay and Lille, in order to secure these two towns, and to annoy the enemy at Valenciennes. The commandant of Lille was fortunate enough to maintain that place ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... afford.... By his parents he was trained up in the episcopal worship,'[24] but for a long time, he says that the only religion that he practised was 'going to church one day in seven to hear a man preach, to read, and sing, and rabble over a prayer.' (It is easy to smile at the old-fashioned word; but let us try to remember it when we ourselves are tempted to get up too late in the morning and 'rabble over' our ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... the crack of his rifle, there was no movement ahead; then something rolled from the sledge and lay doubled up in the snow. A hundred yards beyond it, the huskies stopped in a rabble and turned to look ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... his Memoirs that at first public opinion was opposed to this change; even those who at the beginning had shown the greatest repugnance to being addressed as Citizen, disliked conferring the title of Monsieur upon Revolutionists and the rabble, and they pretended to address as Citizen those whom they saw fit to include in this class. Many turned the new state of affairs to ridicule. The Parisians, always of a malicious humor, made perpetual ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... he got up, took his stick, and seemed about to depart. Just then in burst a rabble rout of game-keepers and river-watchers who had come from the petty sessions, and were in high glee, the two poachers whom the landlord had mentioned having been convicted and heavily fined. Two or three of them were particularly boisterous, running against some of ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... accomplished with great pains by the ladies of the queen's mimic court, Sir John Finett superintending "The Bower of Beautie," as his peculiar province. To Sir George Goring were allotted the bears, satyrs, imps, angels, gods, and other like rabble, who were taught with much labour and difficulty, in so short ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... Roy hors de page, became a sort of watchword. And it was constantly in the mouths of all the runners of the Court, that nothing could preserve the balance of the constitution from being overturned by the rabble, or by a faction of the nobility, but to free the Sovereign effectually from that Ministerial tyranny under which the Royal dignity had been oppressed in the person of ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke
... Cambria's solitary shore, Give to St. David one true Briton more. [b]For who would leave, unbrib'd, Hibernia's land, Or change the rocks of Scotland for the Strand? There none are swept by sudden fate away, But all, whom hunger spares, with age decay: Here malice, rapine, accident, conspire, And now a rabble rages, now a fire; Their ambush here relentless ruffians lay, And here the fell attorney prowls for prey; Here falling houses thunder on your head, And here a female atheist talks you dead. [c]While Thales waits the wherry, that contains Of dissipated wealth the small remains, ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... They tell blood-curdling stories of things that have never happened to them—speak of crimes they have never committed ... and the audience that comes here enjoys the pleasant titillation of hobnobbing with the most dangerous rabble ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... fire of the minute-men was increasing once more,—answered by volleys from Percy's platoons. The British, smarting under the tormenting fusilade, angry over the thought that they were being assailed by a rabble of farmers and were on the defensive, became wanton and barbaric, pillaging houses, and murdering ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin
... to call them smart Friseurs from France: That he who builds a chop-house, on his door Paints "The true old original Blue Boar!"- These are the arts by which a thousand live, Where Truth may smile, and Justice may forgive:- But when, amidst this rabble rout, we find A puffing poet to his honour blind; Who slily drops quotations all about Packet or post, and points their merit out; Who advertises what reviewers say, With sham editions every second day; Who ...
— The Village and The Newspaper • George Crabbe
... told the King and Queen that they were sore oppressed by "ill men" who ruled in New York "by the sword, at the sole will of an insolent alien, assisted by some few, whom we can give no better name than a rabble." From other parts of the colony too letters were written calling Leisler a bold usurper, and begging the King to do something "to break this heavy yoke of worse than ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
... us here in England? It is the love of the people; it is the attachment to their government, from the sense of the deep stake they have in such a glorious institution, which gives you your army and your navy, and infuses into both that liberal obedience without which your army would be a base rabble, and your navy ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... might wax fat.) It was in the laughter of my heart that I tip-toed into his greasy privacy. I forced the strong-box at his ear while he sprawled beside his wife. He was my butt, my ape, my jumping-jack. And now ... O fool, fool! (Duped by such knaves as are a shame to knavery, crime's rabble, hell's tatterdemalions!) Shorn to the quick! Rooked to my vitals! And I must thieve for my daily bread like any crawling blackguard in the gutter. And my sister ... my kind, innocent sister! She will come smiling to me with ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XV • Robert Louis Stevenson
... wondrous passage from Endymion, of the descent of the wild inspired rabble into India. Ed plucked for a moment at his lower lip, and then, with a "Hm! What's it all about, ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... a vile, infamous rabble, about two hundred in number. With a few exceptions, they consist of escapados from the Barbary shore, from Tetuan, from Tangier, but principally from Mogadore; fellows who have fled to a foreign land from the punishment due to their misdeeds. Their manner of life in Lisbon ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... papers into his pocket, he hurried toward the newspaper office from which were to emanate, as editorials, the carefully concocted appeals to the passions of the rabble which he had been all the afternoon so busily engaged ...
— The Garies and Their Friends • Frank J. Webb
... saw that the police had formed a line across the avenue, and that such battered remnants of the invalid corps as had escaped were limping off behind their cover as fast as possible. The presence of the city's guardians had caused a brief hesitation in the approaching and broken edge of the rabble. Seeing this the brave sergeant ordered a charge, which was promptly and swiftly made, the mob recoiling before it more and more slowly as under pressure it became denser. There was no more effort to carry out the insane, rather than humane, tactics of the invalid corps, ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... the street, attended by a rabble rout of boys—diavoli scatenati—clean, grinning, white-teethed, who kept incessantly shouting, "Soldo, soldo!" I do not know why these sea-urchins are so far more irrepressible than their land brethren. But it is always ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... The rabble of men and boys, more inclined to hoot at the soldier and torment him than to receive or inflict any serious wounds, gave way at the approach of signori with drawn swords, and the French soldier was ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... on the edge of a volcano," he told her, with grim force; "and at any moment you may be overwhelmed. Have you never faced that yet? Haven't you yet begun to realise that Maritas is a hotbed of scoundrels—the very scum and rabble of creation—blackguards whom their own countries have, for the most part, refused to tolerate—some of them half-breeds, all of them savages? Haven't you yet begun to ask yourself what you may expect from these devils when they take the law into their own hands? ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... The magistrates, even the courts, lent brilliant dresses. One old writer laments that the ignorant people have so little sense for arts of this kind. "Often tumult and mocking are heard, for it is the greatest joy to the rabble if the spectators fall down through broken benches." The old three-storied stage of the mysteries was often retained, with heaven above, earth in the middle space, and hell below; where, according to the stage direction of ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... no bad object, and that this friendship rests not on any criminal design; yet, under this interpretation, it accords not with the dignity of the learned to expose yourself to calumny, and put up with the rudeness of the rabble." He replied: "O my friend, withdraw the hand of reproach from the skirt of my fatality, for I have frequently reflected on this advice which you offer me, and find it easier to suffer contumely on his account than to forego his ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 2, Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... the butchers to defend their fellow, though most blamed him; and there they all fell to it to knocking down and cutting many on each side. It was pleasant to see, but that I stood in the pit, and feared that in the tumult I might get some hurt. At last the rabble broke up, and so I away to White Hall and so to St. James's, but I found not Sir W. Coventry, so into the Park and took a turn or two, it being a most sweet day, and so by water home, and with my father and wife walked in the garden, and then anon to supper and to bed. The Duke ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... two-handed sword, cleared a space around the exhausted Gilbert. The two other knights arriving at this moment, the contest became more equal. But the mob were now displaying deadlier weapons, and Rodolph reluctantly resolved to command his chivalry to disperse the rabble, when his soldiers arrived with their arms. Inflamed by the loss of their comrades, the now formidable troops threw themselves upon the citizens, and pursued them with great slaughter to their homes. When the knights were left without an enemy, Gilbert advanced to embrace his deliverer. But ...
— The Truce of God - A Tale of the Eleventh Century • George Henry Miles
... you are, marechal," cried Anne of Austria joyfully. "I trust you have brought this rabble to reason." ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... the sensation writers, who act the part of the 'dreadful boys' who frightened aunts, yelled out that emancipation was a mistake. 'The Jamaica negroes were as savage as when they left Africa.' They might have put it much stronger by saying, as the rabble that attended Tom Sayers's funeral, or that collects at every execution at Newgate. But our golden age is not in the past. It is in the future—in the good time coming yet for ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... line of men, women and boys on both sides of the steps. The elders tried to persuade father to give up the attempt and go no further. He turned to them and said, "I came to conquer for the Lord, and if you do not come with me I shall go alone." When the rabble saw them coming, they began to shout, "Here they come. Here come the saints." A boy approached—more bold than the rest—and as he came father took him by the hand and said, "Good morning, my little man. I am glad to see the young as well as the old to welcome me." Then ...
— Sixty Years of California Song • Margaret Blake-Alverson
... fine curtains, and says, "I wonder that pretty and intelligent woman hasn't more taste. She might live like a lady if she pleased, and dress as I do; but she pokes on just as she began, and dresses no better than the minister's wife, and has a rabble of poor, forlorn creatures whom I wouldn't let into my house, nor into my wood-shed, running after her for food and clothing, and nobody ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous
... the vilest rabble show themselves, And wave their tattered caps in mockery at us. All honest citizens would sooner make A weary circuit over half the town, Than bend their backs before ...
— Wilhelm Tell - Title: William Tell • Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
... after truth, runs a question down, worries and kills it, then quits it like a vermin, and starts some new game, to lead him a new dance, and give him a fresh breathing through bog and brake, with the rabble yelping at his heels and the leaders perpetually at fault. This he calls sport-royal. He thinks it as good as cudgel-playing or single-stick, or anything else that has life in it. He likes the cut and thrust, ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... suitable for an outlaw. Gavard was a man who was always in opposition. He had just completed his fiftieth year, and he boasted that he had already passed judgment on four Governments. He still contemptuously shrugged his shoulders at the thought of Charles X, the priests and nobles and other attendant rabble, whom he had helped to sweep away. Louis Philippe, with his bourgeois following, had been an imbecile, and he could tell how the citizen-king had hoarded his coppers in a woollen stocking. As for the Republic of '48, that had been a mere farce, the working classes had deceived him; however, ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... More had written to Walpole,—"Poor France! though I am sorry that the lawless rabble are so triumphant, I cannot help hoping that some good will arise from the sum of human misery having been so considerably lessened at one blow by the destruction of the Bastille. The utter extinction of the Inquisition, and the redemption ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... of Paris is very gloomy; the rabble armed—keeping the Government in awe—failures in all directions, and nothing but ruin and misery. This is too gloomy a letter for a birthday, and the Queen must apologise for it. The Prince wishes to be ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Vol 2 (of 3), 1844-1853 • Queen Victoria
... the due of the late professor of natural philosophy and artillery tactics at the Virginia Military Institute. True it was that at Harper's Ferry, where, as Colonel T. J. Jackson, he had commanded until Johnston's arrival, he had begun to bring order out of chaos and to weave from a high-spirited rabble of Volunteers a web that the world was to acknowledge remarkable; true, too, that on the second of July, in the small affair with Patterson at Falling Waters, he had seemed to the critics in the ranks not altogether unimposing. He emerged from Falling Waters Brigadier-General ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... favour by dishonourable means, and who had no other object than to flatter the people. Accordingly Marius formed a design to eject Metellus from the city; and for this purpose he allied himself with Glaucia and Saturninus,[105] who were daring men, and had at their command a rabble of needy and noisy fellows, and he made them his tools in introducing his measures. He also stirred up the soldiers, and by mixing them with the people in the assemblies he overpowered Metellus with his faction. Rutilius,[106] ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... abolition by Augustus. The city passed formally under Roman jurisdiction in 80 B.C., according to the will of Ptolemy Alexander: but it had been under Roman influence for more than a hundred years previously. There Julius Caesar dallied with Cleopatra in 47 B.C. and was mobbed by the rabble; there his example was followed by Antony, for whose favour the city paid dear to Octavian, who placed over it a prefect from the imperial household. Alexandria seems from this time to have regained its old prosperity, commanding, as it did, an important granary of Rome. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... along the Christian line, there rose a mingled shout and sound of laughter near the gate of the city. A Moorish horseman, armed at all points, issued forth, followed by a rabble, who drew back as he approached the scene of danger. The Moor was more robust and brawny than was common with his countrymen. His visor was closed; he bore a huge buckler and a ponderous lance; his cimeter was of a Damascus blade, and his richly ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... to him, Phoebe," said Rebecca, warningly. "Ef we should lose the man in all this rabble o' folks we would not ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... was lovely. Look here, Tom; I'm going shopping—to get some hooks and things. Mind that young rabble does not throw ...
— The Lost Middy - Being the Secret of the Smugglers' Gap • George Manville Fenn
... altogether more formidable but yet undefined character. When nothing further transpired, the feeling uppermost with the people was unbounded derision at that impotent fiasco, and a loathing contempt for the cowering Johannesburg rabble who betrayed and sacrificed the insensate doctor. It was loudly asserted that the combined forces of the two Republics were competent to resist an invasion a hundred times stronger than the one so foolishly attempted; but, with cooler counsels, it was resolved to adopt the ...
— Origin of the Anglo-Boer War Revealed (2nd ed.) - The Conspiracy of the 19th Century Unmasked • C. H. Thomas
... they cursed and swore always, drunk or sober; John Canty was a thief, and his mother a beggar. They made beggars of the children, but failed to make thieves of them. Among, but not of, the dreadful rabble that inhabited the house, was a good old priest whom the King had turned out of house and home with a pension of a few farthings, and he used to get the children aside and teach them right ways secretly. Father Andrew also taught Tom a little Latin, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... before black-bearded riders—women mostly these last, with faces white-set and strange of eye, or all beblubbered with weeping. Then came a man or two also on horseback, old and reverend. After them a draggled rabble of lads and half-grown girls, bound together with ropes and kept at a dog's trot by the pricking spears of the men-at-arms behind, who thought it a jest to sink a spear point-deep in the flesh of a man's back—"drawing the claret wine" they ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... whether of tyranny reared upon a thousand years of usurpation, military despotism of a day's growth, or presumptuous wealth accumulated by robbery, hypocrisy and insidious assassination. Instead of leading in the reformation of leviathan wrongs, the ministry waits for the rabble to applaud before it commends.[1] It was not in this manner that the great Christ set the world in motion, sowed broadcast the dynamite which uprooted long-established infamies, and prepared the way for the ultimate redemption of the world ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... present at the examination of this peasant. The moment I heard of the errand which had brought this rabble of visitors, a sudden thought struck me. I conceived the possibility of rendering the incident subordinate to the great enquiry which drank up all the currents of my soul. I said, this man is arraigned of murder, and murder is the master-key that ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... to see and to describe; to "see clearly and describe vividly" gives the pass on all state occasions. It is the "cap of darkness" and the talaria, and wafts them whither they will. The doors of boudoirs and senate-chambers open quickly, and close after them,—excluding the talentless and staring rabble. I, who am one of the humblest of the seers,—a universal admirer of all things beautiful and great,—from the commonwealths of Plato and Solon, severally, expulsed, as poet without music or politic, and a follower of the great,—I, from my dormitory, or nest, of twelve feet square, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... to such an extortion had it been in my power to avoid it? But your precipitate flight gave me to understand that you had killed your adversary. Any delay in the town might have been attended with danger, backed as his reverence was by all the rabble of the inn." ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... it had been the rude, ill-mannered rabble instead of the polite, kind-appearing gentleman who was a thief and stole my money. I am so ashamed that I was deceived by his pleasant words. Besides, I have bought a roll ...
— Pixy's Holiday Journey • George Lang
... in spite of opposing conditions and rabble protest and doleful prophecy and the assurance of certain perils, we turned our faces toward the unfriendly land of the sunset skies, the open ...
— Vanguards of the Plains • Margaret McCarter
... Kayser, which they would certainly have precipitated, except for the fear of acting indiscreetly, in order to precipitate themselves on him. Amid all those unknown persons who approached him, Vaudrey sought a friend as he felt himself lost and taken by assault by this rabble. ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... greatest happiness which the citizens can enjoy to possess a moderate and convenient fortune; for when some possess too much, and others nothing at [1296a] all, the government must either be in the hands of the meanest rabble or else a pure oligarchy; or, from the excesses of both, a tyranny; for this arises from a headstrong democracy or an oligarchy, but very seldom when the members of the community are nearly on an equality with each other. We will assign a reason for this when we come to treat of the alterations ...
— Politics - A Treatise on Government • Aristotle
... friend, noble and brave, and I begged his body, that I might burn it upon the funeral-pile, and mourn over him. Ay, on my knees, amid the dust and blood of the arena, I begged that boon, while all the Roman maids and matrons, and those holy virgins they call vestal, and the rabble, shouted in mockery, deeming it rare sport, forsooth, to see Rome's fiercest gladiator turn pale, and tremble like a very child, before that piece of bleeding clay; but the praetor drew back as if I were pollution, ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... remembering one of his figures. All the degrees of stupidity and of drunkenness, all the grossness and mawkishness of orgies, the frenzy of the lowest pleasures, the cynicism of the vulgarest vice, the buffoonery of the wildest rabble, all the most brutal emotions, the basest aspects of tavern and alehouse life, have been painted by him with the brutality and insolence of an unscrupulous man, and with such a sense of the comic, such an impetuosity, such an intoxication of inspiration, one might say that words cannot ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... and industrialists, the people who were always the backbone of Gram. And it goes from them down to the commonfolk. Assessments on the lords, taxes on the people, inflation to meet the taxes, high prices, debased coinage. Everybody's being beggared except this rabble of new lords he has around him, and that slut of a ...
— Space Viking • Henry Beam Piper
... aggravating a Fault; and though such a Treatment of an Author naturally produces Indignation in the Mind of an understanding Reader, it has however its Effect among the Generality of those whose Hands it falls into, the Rabble of Mankind being very apt to think that every thing which is laughed at with any Mixture of Wit, ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... army, which entered Asia by crossing the Hellespont, Antiochus retreated southward; and the decisive battle was fought near Magnesia, at the foot of Mount Sipylus. The Romans obtained an easy and bloodless victory over the vast but disorderly rabble of the Syrian monarch. Only 400 Romans fell, while Antiochus lost 53,000 men. He at once gave up the contest in despair, and humbly sued for peace. The conditions were hard. He had to cede all his dominions west of Mount Taurus (that is, the whole of Asia Minor), ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... the 7th of April they assembled for the conclave. At that instant (inauspicious omen!) a terrible flash of lightning, followed by a stunning peal of thunder, struck through the hall, burning and splitting some of the furniture. The hall of conclave was crowded by a fierce rabble, who refused to retire. After about an hour's strife, the Bishop of Marseilles, by threats, by persuasion, or by entreaty, had expelled all but about forty wild men, armed to the teeth. These ruffians rudely and insolently searched the whole building; they looked under ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various |
